pentecost 24 year C

Haggai 1: 5b-2:9 NRSV text
Psalm 145: 1-5; 17-21 NRSV text
2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5; 13-17 NRSV text
Luke 20: 27-38 NRSV text

 

The Lectionary has unhelpfully jumped us from the story of Zacchaeus in 19: 1-10 (set in Jericho) to the middle of a series of disputes in the Temple over the issue of Jesus’ authority that begins in 20:45 – this time with the Saducees. This is ironic: while it may make sense in terms of the Church Year, it drives a coach and horses through Luke’s narrative structure. We have been “on the road to Jerusalem” ever since 9:51, observing keenly the development of what Jesus means by discipleship in the light of his message of the Kingdom of God. And now, at the crucial moment, we miss the two key episodes that signify a huge shift in the narrative: the entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple!

The question of Jesus’ authority as an interpreter of God’s purposes
Let’s rewind just a moment. Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem. A huge crowd of disciples have announced his coming and his purpose almost at the very gates of the city: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven!” (19:38) Jesus is proclaimed the king promised by Gabriel to Mary and sung about by the angels to the shepherds. This is the Royal Messiah – the Davidic king.

This is also Jerusalem’s moment – Jerusalem’s kairos. This is the word Luke uses in 19:44 which is translated, “the time of your visitation from God”. Jerusalem appears to have heard the shouts! And what is Jerusalem’s response? It is given by “some of the Pharisees in the [celebrating] crowd”: “Teacher, order your disciples to stop!” (19:39)

Significantly, the Pharisees also represent the Temple authorities. Right from the start, therefore, Luke is setting us up for a confrontation with the Temple – the place where it all begins in his story (1:5ff). The Temple is the centre of the Jewish universe. Its very structure proclaims and reflects the (believed) divinely-ordered structure of the world. Its own centre is the Holy of Holies – the place where God is present. It is a sign of the world as God is believed to want it. Jesus’ message of the Kingdom concerns precisely the same issue: “the Kingdom of God” is shorthand for the whole world ordered according to the will and purposes of God.

The question, therefore, is this: “Do these two pictures of the world under God (the Temple and the Kingdom) match? And if they don’t, whose is right: the Temple, or Jesus?” We get the answer (if we haven’t already!) pretty immediately: Jesus’ first act upon actually entering the city is to go into the Temple and cleanse it! Jesus’ verdict on the Temple is given: “[God’s] house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it into a den of robbers!” (20:46).

And then we have the conflict revealed, naked, up close and personal: “Every day he was teaching in the Temple. The chief priests, the scribes and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard” (20:47-8).

Here’s the problem Jesus’ opponents are faced with: Jesus is dangerous. The sort of world he envisages stands seriously at odds with the world of the Temple, in which everything is tidily sorted out into who is in and who is out, who is honoured and who isn’t, who deserves what and who owes what and to whom. Underpinning all of this is the fundamental bone of contention: the God whom Jesus proclaims is very different from God as they understand God to be, and what Jesus claims as doing God’s will appears to be radically at odds with the tradition. They want to get rid of him, but they cannot – because of his enormous popular appeal. The Temple is public. While Jesus is there, the presence of the crowds and his overwhelming popularity ensure his safety and frustrate their plans for him.

What, then, can they do? Their answer is to try and undermine him publicly by challenging his authority. If they can show that Jesus is a heretic, or against the tradition, or inferior to the established teachers and interpreters of the Torah and the tradition, they will undermine his support base and be free to move against him.

So begins a series of challenges from the chief priests, scribes and elders: “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?” (20:2). At stake is Jesus’ right to “teach the people” as he does. At issue is Jesus’ version of the Good News of God (cf 20:1a). At the heart of it is Jesus’ understanding of who God is.

There are a series of set pieces, beginning with the challenge from the Pharisees. This doesn’t work – Jesus merely becomes more popular (cf 20:19), so they resort to subterfuge and send spies to trap him with the question of taxes. He silences them – Luke says, “They were not able to trap him in the presence of the people by what he said; and being amazed by their answer, they became silent” (20:26).

We are set, then, for Luke to wheel on the next contenders – a group whom we have not yet met: the Saducees.

Resurrection and revolution: Jesus and the Saducees (1)
The Saducees were the ruling classes; the priestly aristocracy. Politically and theologically conservative (unlike the Pharisees), they focussed their attention on Torah. This put them in a different place from the Pharisees over a number of issues, but the one distinguishing difference between them was over the issue of resurrection.

The belief in bodily resurrection belonged with radical politics. The Pharisees believed that Jews would be resurrected bodily in order to share in the promised future God had for Israel – a future that had been promised through the prophets, but which had not come to pass. Resurrection was the assurance that God’s promises were for this generation – whichever “this” generation happened to be!

Resurrection, in other words, belongs with hope. It is the affirmation that we are to be dissatisfied with the way things are, because a better future is coming. We are to strive for that future – and if striving means running the risk of dying, well, we can face that, too – because we will be raised from the dead!

In Jesus’ context, people were expecting the Messiah and the establishment of Israel as an independent, sovereign state, free of those who had ruled successively ever since the Babylonians. The burning question of the day was, “What about the Romans?” Judea was a hotbed of political radicalism and unrest. To revolt was to court almost certain death – an agonising, humiliating death by crucifixion. Yet there was no shortage of willing martyrs! The phrase, “Deny yourself! Take up your cross!” is in all probability a recruiting slogan for radical revolutionary groups. And for these would-be revolutionaries, resurrection was a key hope and motivation. Resurrection promised would-be martyrs that they had nothing to fear: even if they were killed, they would not miss out on God’s promised future.

The Saducees were wealthy aristocrats. They managed to co-exist with the Romans and work within the system without undue frustration – and certainly without losing advantage, privilege, power and wealth! Small wonder, then, that these political conservatives sought to maintain the present order rather than change it! “Normal business” meant that they were pitted against the dangerously revolutionary Pharisees – people like Saul of Tarsus. However, here, they find common cause with the Pharisaic opposition to Jesus and the revolution (theological and political) which he represented. Jesus’ notion of a community of radical inclusivity, characterised by the Great Reversal, is not one that they can countenance! Jesus needs to be silenced – and for their part, they go scurrying back to Moses to try and do so.

“Do you follow Moses?”: Jesus and the Saducees (2)
Remember, the pint here is to undermine Jesus’ authority, not simply to score debating points. Although the subject under discussion is resurrection, the point being attempted is to invoke the greatest authority figure (Moses) and show that what Jesus teaches goes against him.

Note the opening “Teacher” (20:28). This isn’t an acknowledgement of Jesus’ authority, but is characteristically ironic. All of Jesus’ opponents in this section of the gospel use the term. It is used sarcastically: “You style yourself as a teacher; a teacher needs authority! You ain’t got it – and we’re about to show you up!” In other words, hostilities are opening, and battle is about to commence!

They immediately bring on the Big Gun: “Moses wrote ..” The subject is levirate marriage. This is probably a well-rehearsed argument used against the Pharisees and others who believed in resurrection: the point of employing it against Jesus, however, is not so much to make the usual point about the apparent absurdity of resurrection, but to trap Jesus into declaring himself against Moses. Jesus is well aware of this, which is why, in his response to the Saducees, he himself invokes Moses against them (v37).

It is vital to Luke that Jesus is clearly with Moses and not against him: Luke tells us that, although Jesus reinterprets the tradition, he does so faithfully, so that Jesus does not come to nullify “the Law and the Prophets”, but to fulfil them (a point he makes absolutely explicit in the Emmaus Road conversation on Easter Day). We can trust Jesus when he speaks about God, in other words, because Jesus interprets the Scriptures faithfully. It is Jesus’ view of God that is right, not God as preached and encountered in the Temple.

Resurrection and marriage: Jesus and the Saducees (3)
Resurrection is a late development within the Jewish tradition. For most of the Old Testament period, people did not conceive of life after death. There was only this life.

Resurrection was a bold, radical belief along the spectrum of the emerging belief in life beyond death. Many (the Essenes, perhaps, and maybe some Saducees) believed in something akin to the immortality of the soul – that we survive death as disembodied spirits. Resurrection said something radically more: that God’s promises are for this world and that we will live again as embodied souls in order to enjoy them!

The Saducees use Moses’ institution of levirate marriage (whereby a widowed woman was married within the family to raise children to the memory of her dead husband) as an example of the absurdity of resurrection. “In what sense do we survive death? We live on in the memory of our children!” is essentially their position. Having children, therefore, was vital. Furthermore, it was vital to ensure that children remained within the extended family. This ensured social and economic stability.

The point is this: if Levi married Rebekkah and then died, and Rebekkah was married off to Levi’s brother, Reuben, the family connection meant that Rebekkah was always, in some sense, Levi’s wife – because this is how she was thought of in the family memory! She could still be both Levi’s and Reuben’s wife – but only because Levi had died! If Levi was raised to life again, it created an absurd situation!

This is essentially the argument posed to Jesus. In response, he posits two possibilities – two “worlds”. He contrasts “the children of this age” with “the children of God/children of the resurrection”. Resurrection is re-creation. The world of resurrection is the New World. It is the old born again to new life, yes, but it is changed in the act of re-creation (resurrection). The old order does not apply.

Here we need to note something radical in what Jesus says about marriage. The idea that women are shunted from one male to another without choice – and for the purpose of bearing children – sounds remarkably barbaric to our ears. It belongs to a patriarchal society in which women were valued as breeding stock (after all, women appear in the list with oxen and donkeys in the commandment not to covet neighbour’s possessions!).

Here Jesus says something that must have caused a stir. His point about the resurrection ending marriage is that there is no need to continue to order life according to the need to procreate! If there is no death, there is no need to continue having children to continue the human community. In other words, the system of marriage in which the primary purpose is seen as procreation – and which condemned women to the role of breeding stock – is part of the Old World – the order of sin and death! The world of resurrection is Good News for women because it is a world in which they will participate fully as equals – precisely as God had always intended in creation.

Resurrection and promise: Jesus and the Saducees (4)
Jesus goes on to cite Moses against the Saducees by referring to the Patriarchs. Yahweh is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. His conclusion is two-fold: God is not the God of the dead, but the living. To God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are therefore alive, not dead. “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” represent the line of the unsought promises of Yahweh. God’s promises were “to Abraham and his descendants forever”. Note what Jesus is implicitly saying: the promises were to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not just to their descendants! In other words, for God to be faithful and for God’s promises to be true, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will have to be resurrected – and this, says Jesus, is what he supposes Moses necessarily believed, too!

But the second, unstated conclusion is left hanging in the air: “If you do not believe in the resurrection, you must believe that Moses is dead. You are citing a dead authority. Yet to me, Moses is alive! Now, who takes Moses more seriously?

“Don’t jump the gun!”: 2 Thessalonians 2: 1-17
Resurrection belongs to a determined, persistent, hanging on to the reality of the promises of God for a different world and a different future. It is a refusal to accept that it is enough merely to believe in God’s promises: God’s promises must come true “for me and my generation, not merely for my descendants! Therefore, I believe, in the words of Job, that ‘though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’!”

Resurrection also belongs to faith in the return of Jesus. The earliest Christians expected Jesus’ imminent return, as he had promised. Jesus’ return was the Day of the Lord – the destruction of the wicked. Presumably some calamitous events had occurred in the region, convincing some of the Thessalonians that this must mean that Jesus was about to return, so that they were giving up work and effectively “getting packed and ready”!

Paul writes to warn them against jumping the gun. This is not necessarily a signal that Jesus had or was about to return. Instead, Paul says, they can expect things to get worse before they get better!

The only point I want to make in this context is this: eschatology is dangerous! It is dangerous because can provoke the wrong sort of religious extremism, instead of being an encouragement to faith. On the one hand, the sort of conservative investment in the status quo manifested by the Saducees (an absence of eschatology) can result in a fatalistic acceptance of the way things are, and paralyse action to change the world. On the other hand, eschatological hope can easily tip into the sort of millenarianism of the Thessalonians, or an inappropriate impatience that longs for some sort of apocalyptic intervention from God to destroy what is presently wrong. We see this in the US churches that are actively hoping that Zionist extremists will blow up the Dome of the Rock so that the Temple can be rebuilt and sacrifice re-instituted, thereby triggering the Second Coming and the millennial rule of Christ! These groups have a DIY Temple in kit form, just waiting to be shipped to Israel, so that there is a minimum delay in getting the whole thing going!

Or we make other mistakes, and identify our own particular political or social project with the Kingdom, seeing others as faithless and missing out on God’s wider purposes. The point is this: resurrection, eschatology and faith in Jesus’ return belong to God’s saving work begun in Jesus – transforming the world into the Kingdom of God. And God works according to a divine timetable that is always unknown and mysterious! The challenge is to “discern the signs of the times”. And the most effective way is to avoid fevered speculation, and instead concentrate on modelling Church life and practice on Jesus. The more closely we do that- the more closely the daily story of the Church mirrors the gospels – the safer will be our conviction that we’re involved in God’s project, rather than replacing it with our own “salvation programme”.

Return to the Temple (Haggai 1: 5b-2:9)
The year is 520BCE, and Haggai concerns the rebuilding of the Temple (which was completed and rededicated in 515). Haggai was probably one of those who remained in Judah during the Exile. We might imagine him standing among the ruins of Jerusalem, gazing at the site of the Temple that had been destroyed. He was one of Yahweh’s people, standing at the site of the House of Yahweh … and there was no House! What of Yahweh? Had Yahweh deserted the people?

Haggai prophesies both the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of the Davidic monarchy in the person of Zerubbabel. Note how the prophet invokes the images of Exodus and creation to describe the return from exile and the rebuilding. The reconstruction of the Temple will be as a result of the work of Yahweh. Yahweh has not deserted the people: “My spirit abides with you!”, declares Yahweh through the mouth of the prophet.

For Haggai, the return from Exile and the rebuilding of the Temple is described in “world-shaking” terms! It is Yahweh’s re-ordering of creation. It is re-creation – resurrection! Haggai describes wealth pouring into the Temple – not because it is a den of robbers, but as a blessing from Yahweh. The world is in the process of being re-ordered and restored. Yahweh’s glory will fill the Temple and radiate throughout the earth.

When we read Haggai, with its sense of joy and hope, alongside today’s gospel text, we cannot but be aware of the contrast between what is anticipated and what transpires over time. For me, it is similar to looking back at the events of 1990 in South Africa, when Mandela was released, or the elections in 1994, whilst reading the latest crime and poverty statistics in South Africa.

The truth is that all we do in terms of transforming the world into some semblance of the Kingdom is only ever mustard-seed size. It is shot through with ambiguity and sometimes outright failure and betrayal. We are caught between the temptations either to despair and give up – to become depressed or cynical – and to claim too much for what we do. Both are inappropriate. The Kingdom and its coming is ultimately God’s work. Ours is to join in and to erect signs of the Kingdom that point to new possibilities: the world, not as it is, but as the Kingdom of God. We can change things: only God can bring about the ultimate re-creation necessary for this to happen. But, the Bible tells us, a seed has been planted, which will come to full flowering. It is the seed of resurrection. It has happened – to one man only, but to the man whom Paul describes as the Second Adam, progenitor of the New Creation. It has happened to Jesus. Therefore, the world belongs to God, because its future lies in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus, whom God raised from the dead.

Hallelujah!

 

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